Reviews, Discussion, and Analysis of Anime by Matthew Magnus Lundeen

Fantasy

Video game adaptations are almost always bad. The best of them excel only on the condition that you overlook large caveats, be they performances, the script, or how faithful the project is to the original. Video games are hard to adapt. You’re either trying to appeal to fans and alienating movie-goers or vice-versa. Both can fail depending on what is being adapted and how.

In the mid-2000s’, Warren Ellis wanted to make a direct-to-video animated film based on Castlevania. While the script was approved by Konami, the work ended up stuck in production hell for years. Adi Shankar, a producer who went viral with his “Bootleg Universe” series of fan-films, eventually was approached about producing an animated series based on Ellis’ script. While he turned down the same idea for a live-action film, believing live-action wouldn’t fit, he was more than happy to work on this one.

So eventually, Netflix adapted Ellis’ script into an animated series produced by Powerhouse Animation, an American studio. The first season – all four episodes of it – came out in July of 2017 and took the internet by storm. Everyone, myself included, was instantly clamoring for more. With the release of the second season in the fall of 2018, the show revealed even more of its potential with a longer season, more character drama, and even better animation.

With the recently released and certainly shocking third season fresh in our minds, it might be good to look back on the series as a whole thus far. It’s certainly the best video game adaptation, but is that saying a whole lot? Is Castlevania more than just the sum of its gorgeous animation?

At the beginning of 2019, I wrote: Rising of the Shield Hero is 2019’s First Must-watch. It was a pleasant surprise to start the year, given how apprehensive I typically am about the Isekai genre. I was quite adamant about my excitement for this show after the first several episodes and despite the controversy, I believed it would be a total hit. I wasn’t wrong. It became one of the most-watched anime of the year and after its 25-episode run, a second and third season was confirmed.

Nearing the end of the year, as people begin reflecting on the best of the year, it bears asking if Shield Hero was worth the praise. Did it live up to its strong start?

Worldbuilding is something I get unusually excited about when it is done a certain way. I’ve often ranted about shows like Kekkai Sensen, which depict the supernatural chaos, yet systems of government designed to efficiently counter the chaos. There is a multitude of minor elements of world-building that excite me but it is exceedingly difficult to put into words why. The closest I get is saying that I love the idea of order applied to an unnatural society

Kinoko Nasu, the creator of Fate/ Stay Night, Garden of Sinners, and Tsukihime, has written works tailor-made to cater to me. He has created a modern fantasy universe the complexity of which rivals the works of Rowling and Tolkien. In fairness, the Nasuverse is bloated, with so many alternate universes and different creative minds, but there is still beauty in the chaos.

This past summer, studio Troyca’s Lord El-Melloi II’s Case Files gave me this episode-to-episode joy built entirely on showing off how cool the world is. What I thought would be another misfire in an already packed franchise turned out to be one of my favorite shows this year.

Having watched RWBY since the beginning, I would consider myself a fan, despite how much I rag on it. It’s always been “good” but there was always some sort of caveat attached to any praise I could offer when the volumes were airing.

Volume One – It’s good, except the episodes are sometimes too short, which made it a pain to watch week-by-week. Ultimately, the only episodes I felt really satisfied with were one, eight and 16.

Volume Two – It’s great, except the ending ruins it and Ruby’s biggest opportunity for growth is thrown out the window in exchange for more characters that will never matter.

Volume Three – It’s good, except it sucks. More depressingly, we lost Monty.

Volume Four – Looking back, the narrative was pretty good (compared to what came before), but there is a lot of time wasted. I look on it fondly now, but at the time it aired, I hated it.

Up until around Volume four, people would also make the excuse that Rooster Teeth was a smaller company, but that doesn’t really fly anymore, especially when they are getting nominated for awards and shit. This made the problems stick out more because their status demands they be put up to a standard befitting of their aspirations.

For this reason, I’m delighted to say that Volume Six of RWBY is the first truly good entry in the series. I know right? Surprised the fuck outta me…

I almost never watch Isekai anime, the genre centered around characters transported to other worlds. In recent years, the medium has been so oversaturated with shows like this and my few forays into the genre tended to be more negative than positive.

Today’s show is one that I never had any intention of watching out of a lack of interest. Truth be told I didn’t even know it was an Isekai, and upon learning that I was even less interested. And yet… The Rising of the Shield Hero has become one of the most surprising shows I have fallen in love with.

Previously…

The most shocking twist RWBY has delivered is that volume four was actually good. It only took a lesser product to make me appreciate what I had. When volume five started airing, my excitement was dwindling. Over one divisive volume, I went from optimist to pessimist and was only giving this volume the grace period as a hope that the problems could be solved.

Rewatching volume five with a more balanced critique may have allowed me the same clarity that I went into my review of volume four with. Sadly, even the clairvoyance of one willing to forgive couldn’t excuse what volume five did wrong. Even amongst those who may have enjoyed this season, I can’t imagine that this is perceived as anything other than the worst of the series.

Previously…

Well, after quite some time, it is the beginning of the end, and not in the cliched movie trailer sense, or in the cliched RWBY episode name sense. It is actually more comparable to that of a dying animal, not just because of the declining quality of the series but how this series of reviews is my least viewed on this blog. Regardless, I’ve committed to it and as such its time for me to finally finish this with a review of volume four and my final post on volume five to follow soon after.

It is ranked number 4 on the list of highest-grossing films in Japan and the single highest grossing Anime film of all time. It has garnered worldwide acclaim and has taken the Anime community and the mainstream audience by storm. For a long, while it even beat out Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood on the MyAnimeList charts and even now sits at a comfortable #2. Yes, I am of course talking about Makoto Shinkai’s breakout success, “Kimi No Na Wa”, or “Your Name”.Continue reading →

Last time, I took a long look at the beginning of Rooster Teeth’s Animated Web Series RWBY, both the incredibly promising promotional material and the lackluster first Volume. However, as the title of this series suggests, there are things in this show that I actually like, believe it or not. Volume Two is one of those things that I love. I’m of the mind that there has never been a truly great Volume of RWBY, but of the ones we have gotten, Two may be the closest to fulfilling the promise of the original four character trailers.

With that, I want to spend time focusing on exactly what changed in order to make this Volume so much more memorable and enjoyable. From a much more focused plot to enhanced visuals and direction and even the little tiny details. It’s not all perfect though, and for all its promise, there are some things that make this series incredibly hard to recommend.

In 2012, Rooster Teeth announced a new web series called RWBY. I had already watched all of Red vs Blue, Rooster Teeth’s other major, long-running series, so the “Red” trailer for RWBY truly captivated me. Soon I realized that its creator, Monty Oum, was the same choreographer behind the action in seasons 8, 9 and 10 of Red vs Blue. It’s safe to say that there was plenty of reason to be excited.

One year and three character shorts later, the first volume premiered. It wasn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the word, but I was having fun all the same. By all accounts, I am still a fan, which is strange because if you talk to me about it, and you may think I hate it. Of all the time spent talking about RWBY to my friends or to myself, half the time I talk about all the things I don’t like about it.

There have been plenty of problems with this show from day one. The episode lengths of Volume One, an overabundance of characters, insufficient development for the lead character, and plenty more. This is before Monty Oum’s passing in 2015, after which it became clear that RWBY was becoming a very different type of show without Monty.

RWBY is a mess, but it has somehow kept me watching for its characters, it’s concepts and even it’s action despite a dip in quality I plan to address. How it has managed this is a much more complicated manner and since I have miraculously never written about RWBY before now, this is the perfect time to talk at length about everything I love and hate about RWBY.